thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

Friday, December 30, 2016

I have, for
the past month or so, been looking over the year’s posts - with a view to
compiling a little E-book which allows both their chronological presentation and
some reflections on their significance (if any). I first tried this last year
and titled the result In Praise of Doubt – a
blogger’s year –
although it had a double bonus in starting with some posts from the previous
year and finishing with a “sceptic’s
glossary” whose provocative definitions deserve a higher profile and are
therefore added to the 2016 edition which I hope to publish in a few days –
running at the moment with the title The Slaves’ Chorus …...

This is my 8th
year of blogging – at their height, posts averaged one every 2 days….now they
average one a week – arguably a more appropriate period for disciplined
thinking and writing than the 24 hour frame…..Indeed one of my favourite
bloggers - The Archdruid Report - sticks (religiously) to
a weekly schedule ….

I try to
avoid mainstream media, preferring more marginal writing - so was prepared for
the outcomes of the British referendum and the American elections. But the
Brexit vote in particular was like a kick in the stomach…. ..my EU citizenship,
after all, gives me more significant freedoms (to travel and reside) than does
my British citizenship…. Almost a third of the posts dealt with these 2
issues….

As befits a
blog whose title refers to two mountain ranges another third of posts deal with
my (generally very pleasant) experiences of living in Bulgaria and Romania –
particularly experiences relating to art and wine……

The final
bunch of posts have more miscellaneous topics, generally occasioned by my
reading….. or viewing (documentaries have been an important discovery for me
this past year). Indeed I seemed to find books less gripping this past twelve
months – only seven made sufficient impact to inspire a post -

Romanian
politicians don’t do resignations. When, a few years back, one of their
previous Ministers who had migrated to Brussels as a Euro MP was one of three
Euro MPs to be caught in a sting, the other two quickly resigned but not Romanian
Adrian Severin…..

When Victor
Ponta became Romania’s Prime Minister some 4 years ago, he was almost
immediately discovered by a global scientific journal to have committed
extensive plagiarism for his PhD. He shrugged that off – although it had
immediately led to resignations of German and other national Ministers guilty
of such transgressions. But not in Romania…..Even being indicted by the
country’s powerful anti-corruption brigade (DNA) didn’t seem to rattle
him – only one of the charges would have been liable to remove him.

But Ponta duly went (pushed it appears) in
November 2015 as public anger at political shamelessness reached boiling point
- first from the death of a police outrider escorting a Ministry of Interior’s
car which had no right for such protection but then, at the weekend, from
almost 50 deaths in a night-club which, like all such places in the country,
had absolutely no fire or safety precautions……The “Sarah in Romania” blog can
always be relied upon for a caustic comment on such matters – ….

This time their seems some focus for policy change to the
anger….the country now has a President (Klaus Johannis) who has used at least
the language of radical change - although the jury must remain out on whether
he has the capacity to deliver. And the street protests - which were normally
led by a party political element - look this time to have a slightly more hopeful
base in the citizens……but so-called “civil society” (about which one does not
hear so much these days) has never really taken off in Romania – despite the
extensive funding it got from external sources…..

Despite my
own social democratic credentials, I have never been a fan of the Romanian PSD
party which, for me, immediately absorbed the Ceaucescu lineage into a
distinctive soup of social democratic rhetoric and finance capitalist reality.
Tom Gallagher expressed it best when he used “Theft of a State” as the title of
his book on post 1989 politics in the country.

The most
physical expression you can find of the extent to which the apparatchiks still
have their claws in everything is by checking in each city you visit the large mansions in prime areas which have the various party insignia designating them
as party possessions…..

Hundreds of
politicians are now in jail and it is entirely significant that the current PDS
leader is on a 2-year suspended prison sentence for electoral fraud – occurred when
the party tried to impeach the country’s President…..With considerable reluctance, he seems to have accepted that this prevents him from assuming the position of Prime Minister but has just executed what he considers a brilliant move by nominating an unknown Muslim woman instead.............whose name. however, has just been rejected by the President on what are thought to be security grounds .(he husband is a pro-Assad Syrian activist).... Talk about being too clever by half........this is just playing with the country!!

In May 2016
the local elections put this totally corrupt party back into power in most of
the country’s urban centres. Early December saw less than a 40% turnout in the
parliamentary elections but the PSD took almost half of the vote and the
majority of the seats…..They now control almost everything in Romania except
the Presidency and the judiciary and are already making vague threats against
both……

I also try to include in each post copious links
to a wide variety of media sources and, to a lesser extent, academic works. I
don’t know how many readers follow these links but at any rate I feel
better-informed as a result of digging around to find them.

Typically, I think
of a topic on Friday morning, ponder it during the day and write the post on
Friday evening (yes, my life really is that exciting). Most posts take two to
three hours to research and write.

I’ve been
blogging since 2009, with a resignation from a major project in China I was
leading in 2010 leading to a slow withdrawal from the paid labour front and
giving me more time to enjoy the stretch of country between the Carpathians
(where I summer) and the Balkans (where I winter) and to read, write……and
muse…..

And last
year I collected the year’s posts, put them in chronological order and wrote
both a Preface and Introduction for In
Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s yearwhich
tried to answer such questions why
anyone should be bothered to read my material – and also why some of us have
developed this blogging habit -

My claim for the reader’s
attention is simply expressed –

·experience in a variety of
sectors (and countries) – each closely manned with “gatekeepers” whose language
and rules act to exclude us

·the compulsion (from some
50 years), to record what I felt were the lessons of each experience in short
papers

·Long and extensive reading

·A “voice” which has been
honed by the necessity of speaking clearly to audiences of different
nationalities and class

·intensive trawling of the
internet for wide range of writing

·notes kept of the most
important of those readings

·shared in hyperlinks with
readers

I confess somewhere to an
aversion to those writers (so many!) who try to pretend they have a unique
perspective on an issue and whose discordant babble make the world such a
difficult place to understand. I look instead for work which, as google puts
it, builds on the shoulders of others……my role in a team is that of the resource
person….who finds and shares material….

Perhaps my
father’s hand is evident in the format and discipline of the blogpost – he was
a Presbyterian Minister who would, every Saturday evening, take himself off to
his study to anguish over his weekly sermon which he would duly deliver from
the pulpit the next morning……Arguably indeed the dedication given these past 7
years to the blog is a form of “giving of account” or justification of one’s
life!! I have grown to appreciate the
discipline involved in marshalling one’s thoughts around a theme (in my
father’s case it was a biblical quotation).

I rather
like the format of a blogpost of some 700 words (at most a couple of pages).
Management guru Charles Handy
famously said that he had learned to put his thoughts in 450 words as a result
of the “Thought for the Day” BBC programme to which he was a great contributor.

For me a
post written 4-5 years ago is every bit as good as (perhaps better than)
yesterday’s - but the construction of blogs permits only the most recent posts
to be shown. A book format, on the other hand, requires that we begin……at the
beginning ... It also challenges the author to reflect more critically on the
coherence of his thinking ……. The photo is of a new Bekhiarov I acquired this week (with, lower, the first one I bought from this great BG realist) - both from the great Absinthe water colour gallery in Sofia where I found this week a wonderful 400 page catalogue of the International Watercolour Society's 2016 exhibition in Varna - with a superb global collection. This is their 2013 catalogue

Monday, December 5, 2016

In the
1980s, Margaret Thatcher introduced us to TINA – her refrain being that “there is no
alternative” (to the liberalisation of national and global markets).

Social
democratic parties bought into that argument and have shown no inclination to
rethink policies since the global crisis began almost a decade ago. Jeremy
Corbyn’s Labour party, I grant you, is one exception – but has attracted
vitriolic attack on the basis that there can be no going back to the world of
the 1960s and 1970s.

The argument
generally consists of the following elements -

- The state
can’t get out of the immense debt which it has taken on by rescuing the banks

- Although
the operations of privatisated industries are subject to increasing attack, the
idea of reprivatisation is rarely presented in social democratic programmes

- The
ideology of greed has become so legitimised, lives so atomised and the
commodification trend so strong that notions of collective and cooperative
effort seem more and more unrealistic

Of course,
convincing programmes need to be based on a sound story…..about what exactly
has been going on in the post-war period? It’s clearly not enough simply to
blame neo-liberalism,,,,,

This week I watched one of the best narratives I have
so far come across - Global
Trumpism – presented by Mark Blyth, author of Austerity
– history of a dangerous idea which I wrote about earlier
in the year.

Blyth’s
style of historical ideas, colloquial language and slides is a gripping one
which puts other economists into the shade….

His starting
point is the growth of populism throughout Europe and now the States and the
question whether (as I tended to suggest in one
blogpost on Brexit) it is a reaction to immigration trends and fears – or
has a more basic economic explanation…. He shows how the location of Brexit and
Trump supporters correlates with the devastation caused by globalisation and
recent Chinese imports; job insecurity et al - but then uses the largely unknown
figure of Michael Kalecki to show how the post-war Keynesian consensus
unravelled in the 1970s

Kalecki had warned as far back as 1943
of a central flaw in the Keynes’ model – which duly presented itself in the
1970s with the arrival of serious inflation which was dealt with by first
monetarist and then neo-liberal policies. The post-war regime slowly gave way
to one of secular disinflation; capital assertiveness; global markets; strong
central banks; and weak trade unions and parliament

As befits a
political economist, Blyth wants to know about losers and winners – none of
this cosy nonsense about equilibrium….and uses Branko Milanovic’s slide of global
trends in income distribution showing
the shape of an elephant to back up his argument about global trumpism….

He returns,
finally, to his initial point in exploring the various economic options we seem
to have –

- The sort
of spending on infrastructure which Trump’s campaign envisaged? (probable but
not with anticipated results)

All in all a
really thought-provoking presentation……from a Professor of Political Economy - a dsicipline which hopefully will be finding a deserved place for itself after almost a century of
neglect…….

Sunday, December 4, 2016

A recent
post criticised “political labelling” but ducked the perfectly
legitimate question of the descriptor someone with my set of values and
commitments might find more acceptable.

I object to being called a “leftist” simply because, the label carries the connotation that I favour state power - and I
am a firm believer that “power corrupts”
and always needs an institutional challenge and balance….“The Open Society and its Enemies” was in the early 1960s one of the
key books which influenced me….

So, in my book, central state power needs to be
balanced with citizen power -
properly served by five other systems –

- strong parliaments;

- strong municipalities;

- diversely independent
media;

- independent judicial
systems; and

- real
structures of accountability.

Parse most
European systems and it’s only the northern ones which come through positively
from any ratings….the British one certainly doesn’t fare well….

And excesses of economic power should be
dealt with not only by appropriate structures of anti-monopoly legislation but
by the encouragement (via laws and funding) of cooperatives and worker
participation.

“Balance” is
the key…and that is achieved by state actions which draw from what we might
call the “Acton” toolkit (in honour of the English Lord’s quip about “absolute
power corrupting absolutely”).

England is
perhaps unfairly termed “perfidious” since the “balance of power” principle it
pursued for so long served Europe well…..and is one which deserves more honour
as a serving ideology for our times…..That’s why I was so taken with Henry
Mintzberg when, in 2000, he started to use the term “rebalancing society”. I have always admired the German system.....

My father
was, in the 1950s, part of a group of local dignitaries who used the label “moderate” or "progressive" when they fought in the
municipal elections – neither left nor right….interestingly they faced not only
Conservatives and Labour but an increasingly vociferous groups of liberals…….If
“Progress” had not got such a bad name recently, I might be tempted to use the
term “progressive” of myself…..

I am an “agnostic” in matters of religion and “sceptic” vis-à-vis anything which
passes for conventional wisdom or arouses new enthusiasms (hence my distrust of
the “identity politics” of the past few decades) – but these terms don’t do
justice to the values I hold of equality, fairness, openness and challenge….

Friday, December 2, 2016

Markets
are fascinating things – whether it's farmers harvesting and distilling grapes and
distributing the bottled product to supermarkets and wine boutiques – or artists
crafting their materials to delight us in galleries with their canvasses or
sculptures. All the choices to be made – and the different activities and roles
involved in bringing such things as wines and paintings together with customers
and clients. ........Since a cycling trip through France as a teenager, I’ve always
appreciated wines – but been happy until recently to settle for whatever was
available cheaply in the nearest shop…

Bulgaria
has made me more aware first of the scale of artistic endeavor – the annotated
list of Bulgarian artists in the latest edition of Bulgarian
Realists is now almost 300 (without even starting to give serious
consideration to contemporary artists!) – and, now, of the scale and variety of
its wines… ..

But
it’s been a gradual process of learning about its wines - ever since the first stunning taste of a
Targovishte Muscat at Balcik in 2002 - on our way back from a trip to the Aegean!

So
I’ve been delighted to find these days that young Assen’s Vinoorendo has been
joined by no fewer than 3 other wine shops - first Rumen’s
Winebar 52, Alabin St where we had a lovely evening last week tasting 5 of
the Santa Maria selection – for 5 euros

Then
I stumbled across Tempus Vini
at 81, Tsar Boris – open just 2 months ago and Kallin always poised with an
open bottle to welcome us.

And
yesterday morning I noticed Enjoy Wine
19, Ivan Shishman st - whose Ivo welcomed us not only with amusing quips but with
a couple of tastings. Most of Kallin’s wine stock is Bulgarian – and the same
is true of Enjoy Wine (which organizes not only wine tastings but trips to
vineyards)

If
you have money, it’s not difficult to part with it in such places – as the
owners share their information and passion for the various bottles on offer!

While
googling about the idea of wine markets, I came across this superb blog by a Prof of Political Economy
who clearly takes his wines seriously – while making the whole subject of the wine
market fascinating…..

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

I
have come late to the work of documentarist Adam Curtis. I had registered a
year or so ago his The Century of the
Self (2002) which told the story (as Curtis puts it) of “how those in power
have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of
mass democracy"; and shows how the man who effectively invented the PR
industry which then went on to take over the machinery of state propaganda…….
was Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays.

And
his documentary Bitter
Lake (2015) about the role of Saudi Arabia in post-war politics was a mind-blowing
piece which brought forth this post earlier
this year with its acknowledgment that -

Good
documentaries require a rare combination - knowledge of the subject,
experience of filming, appropriate selection and editing of text, images and
music, and appreciation of how to fit them together

We live in a time of great
uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out
of control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis,
random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed -
they have no idea what to do.

This film is the epic story
of how we got to this strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic
events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand
them.It shows that what has
happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the
journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a
simplified, and often completely fake version of the world.

But because it is
all around us we accept it as normal.HyperNormalisation is a
giant narrative spanning forty years, with an extraordinary cast of characters.
They include the Assad dynasty, Donald Trump, Henry Kissinger, Patti Smith, the
early performance artists in New York, President Putin, intelligent machines,
Japanese gangsters, suicide bombers - and the extraordinary untold story of the
rise, fall, rise again, and finally the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi.

All these stories are woven
together to show how today’s fake and hollow world was created. Part of it was
done by those in power - politicians, financiers and technological utopians. Rather
than face up to the real complexities of the world, they retreated. And instead
constructed a simpler version of the world in order to hang onto power.

And it wasn’t just those in
power. This strange world was built by all of us. We all went along with it
because the simplicity was reassuring. And that included the left and the
radicals who thought they were attacking the system.

The film shows how they
too retreated into this make-believe world - which is why their opposition
today has no effect, and nothing ever changes.But there is another world
outside. And the film shows dramatically how it is beginning to pierce through
into our simplified bubble. Forces that politicians tried to forget and bury
forty years ago - that were then left to fester and mutate - but which are now
turning on us with a vengeful fury.

But
I personally like the way he tries to capture recent intellectual history – and,
in particular, builds bridges across the huge abysses that increasingly
separate the social science disciplines…. We need a lot more of this….

Close
readers of this blog may have noticed that it has occasionally mentioned the
fascinating period of American intellectual history in the 2 decades after the
second world war whose personalities and books in the late 50s and early 60s
helped shape my own thinking people like JK Galbraith, James Buchanan, Ivan
Illich…

An Adam Curtis Resource

The
google search I did for articles and interviews about his work unearthed quite
a few gems – my favourite being this
long interview with him, the second of a series (the first being a fascinating account of how he came to stumble on his particular type of documentary)

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Last year I
drew attention to the fact that, despite their prolific output, economists seemed to have some difficulty in making sense of more global trends –

It’s
significant that the best expositions of the global economic crisis and its
causes rarely come from economists……..somehow the framework within which the
modern economist operates precludes him/her from even the vaguest of
glimmerings of understanding of the complexity of socio-economic events. Their
tools are no better than adequate for short-term work…..

For real
insights into the puzzles of the modern world, think rather David Harvey (a
geographer) and his A Brief
History of Neoliberalism (2005); John Lanchester and James Meek (novellists
and writers); Susan
Strange,Susan
George or Colin
Crouch (political science); or Wolfgang Streeck – a Koeln Professor of
Sociology. All have extensive and eclectic reading; a focus on the long-term;
and the ability to provoke and write clearly.

"Eclectic" is the key word; few economists are trained these days in political economy - which roots the study of economics in the wider context of history and political analysis...... Wolfgang Streeck is Director of the Max Planck
Institute and an unlikely scourge of capitalism – but his texts are becoming
ever more apocalyptic. He has just published another - How
will Capitalism End? - a summary of whose basic thesis can be found in this
2014 New Left Review article

His latest
book, however, explodes any idea of the inevitable arrival of a socialist
paradise –On the
contrary, his is a dystopian vision in which capitalism perishes not with a
bang, but a whimper. Since, he argues, capitalism can no longer turn private
vice into public benefit, its “existence as a self-reproducing, sustainable,
predictable and legitimate social order” has ended. Capitalism has become “more
capitalist than is good for it”.

The postwar
marriage between universal-suffrage democracy and capitalism is ending in
divorce, argues Streeck. The path leading to this has gone via successive
stages: the global inflation of the 1970s; the explosion of public debt of the
1980s; the rising private debt of the 1990s and early 2000s; and the subsequent
financial crises whose legacy includes ultra-low interest rates, quantitative
easing, huge jumps in public indebtedness and disappointing growth.

Accompanying
capitalism on this path to ruin came “an evolving fiscal crisis of the
democratic-capitalist state”. The earlier “tax state” became the “debt state”
and now the “consolidation state” (or “austerity state”) dedicated to cutting
deficits by slashing spending.Three
underlying trends have contributed: declining
economic growth, growing inequality
and soaring indebtedness. These, he
argues, are mutually reinforcing: low growth engenders distributional
struggles, the solution too often being excessive borrowing.

The book
finishes by exploring five systemic disorders – “stagnation, oligarchic
redistribution, plundering of the public domain, corruption and global
anarchy…..” which Streeck talks about here
and which are (very briefly) defined
in this summary

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

I started
this post with every intention of analysing the deep gloom which has descended on
“progressives” not just this year but since it became clear that neoliberalism
– far from dying since 2008 - seemed to be enjoying a second coming. I discovered, however, that this required a bit of a diversion into the issue of political labelling.....so bear with me....

Despite my 20 odd years’ experience as an
elected politician, I have never been happy with political labels…..from the
very beginning (in the late 60s) I could see how my (older) Labour colleagues were closer to
officials than to their constituents. And the sympathy I quickly developed for
community development also gave me a slightly anarchistic approach in matters of political ideology.

I was lucky,
of course, to be able to occupy a senior role at an early age - slipping into
position after the Labour party locally had experienced a few years of
electoral defeats - and had the luxury, after the first few elections, of
knowing that my party had a fairly impregnable grip on power on the massive new
Strathclyde Region which had been set up in 1973/74.

I’ve been
out of politics for the past 25 years - and out of sympathy with British (and
European) political parties for the past 15 of these. It was George Monbiot’s Captive
State (2000) which first alerted me to the scale of the corporate takeover
of the British state – which has intensified globally since then…..

- First, do the editors not realise that use of
such a label for one (only) of the articles is effectively an invitation to
their readers to ignore it or treat it with suspicion? What does this say about
freedom of expression?

- Second, criticism of the logic and effects of
“neo-liberalism” has come from a great variety of quarters – not least
the ordo-liberalism which
has been the backbone of the post-war German economy.

Finally, there is the issue of whether I deserve
the label which has been thrown at me – either from the article or from the
range of beliefs I actually hold. The references in my article are impeccably
mainstream academia (Colin Crouch; Henry Mintzberg) and a final section clearly
signals that I have no truck with statism.

All my political life I have supported community
enterprise and been opposed to state ambitions and the “evil” it brings in, for
example, the adulterated Romanian form. My business card describes me as an
“explorer” – which refers not so much to the nomadic nature of my life in the last
20 years as the open nature of my search for both a satisfactory explanation of
how societies and economies work; with what results; and the nature of relevant
mechanisms for adjusting what societies judge (through democratic processes) to
be unacceptable trends.

I readily admit to having been attracted in my
youth to the British New Left’s analysis of British inequality in the late
1950s - but I was profoundly influenced at University by people such as Karl
Popper and his The
Open Society and its Enemies, Schumpeter (his Capitalism, Socialism
and Democracy and Ralf Dahrendorf; and, at a more practical level,
by Andrew Shonfield and Tony Crosland who were also writing
then about the benefits of the “mixed economy”.More recently I have generally been a fan of the
writings of Will Hutton (whose stakeholder analysis of UK society was
disdained by Tony Bliar on becoming PM).

As an academic I was influenced by the
critical analysis of UK and US political scientists in the 1970s which went
variously under the terms “Limits of the State” or “problems of implementation”
and the softer end of the “public choice school” of institutional
economics.But, unusually, the anarchistic/libertarian sweep
of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire also got to me in the 1970s
(which is why I am (unusually) located in the south west quadrant of the
political compass).

I therefore not only disdained the injunctions of the
dominant left and right extremes of British politics of the 1980s but, as an
influential Scottish regional politician, used my role to create more open
processes of policy-making. Indeed community activists and opposition
politicians were more important partners for me than members of my own party. I held on to my leading political position on the
huge Regional Council simply because I belonged to neither the left or right
factions amongst my colleagues but was their natural second choice! The
definitions I give in my
Sceptic's Glossary reveal the maverick me.

It is "big business" and its abuses of power I have always been hostile to.........The next post's analysis of the "apocalyptic" turn which progressive comments have taken in recent months and years should be read in this light......

Monday, November 21, 2016

More than
200 wines tasted by yours truly in 3 days. And a hugely popular event as you
can see from the pics.

I'm not prepared these days to pay more than 5 euros for a very good Balkan wine and twelve wineries caught my palate for their "best value" wines. Plus half a dozen old favourites........I've selected them by Region...................

Danube Region

Bononia – this was the first
year’s tasting for this new Vidin vineyard, Their Istar Sauvignon and Traminer
were amongst the best – for 5 euros.

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.